Gender-based violence, European Court of Human Rights condemns France

Brussels – The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) chastises France over legislation punishing sexual offences. And it pours gasoline on the fire of a particularly heated French public debate in recent months, following the historic Pelicot trial.

In a ruling issued today (April 24), the ECHR, the Strasbourg-based legal body of the Council of Europe, has ruled in favour of three French women who had brought the case before it, claiming that the French authorities had failed to protect them adequately with respect to the sexual violence they suffered when they were 13, 14, and 16 years old respectively. Specifically, the plaintiffs pointed out that the investigators and national courts had not sufficiently taken into account their very young age and consequent vulnerability in the face of aggressors.

In their decision, judges recognised that in all three cases “the domestic courts had not properly assessed the impact of all the circumstances surrounding the events; nor had they taken sufficient account, in evaluating whether the applicants had been capable of understanding and of giving consent, of the particularly vulnerable situations in which they had found themselves, particularly in view of their ages.

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Judgment L. and Others v. France – criminalisation of non-consensual sexual actshttps://t.co/xrR7VSvcX2#ECHR #CEDH #ECHRpress pic.twitter.com/qhkYT9A8Sg

— ECHR CEDH (@ECHR_CEDH) April 24, 2025

In two out of three cases, the device further reads, “the criminal proceedings had not been conducted
promptly or with due care.” Slowness and superficiality. This is not, the judges made clear, a verdict on the criminal responsibility of the people accused of committing the crimes in question, but rather a procedural assessment of the conduct of French judicial authorities, which reflects (negatively) on the effective protection of human rights in the very nation that claims (rightly or wrongly) to have invented them.

The first case involved a 13-year-old girl at the time of the events, in 2009. Describing herself as “psychologically fragile,” the woman reported being raped by two 21-year-old firefighters. She stated, among other things, that her personal contacts were then shared with other firefighters who subsequently molested her. The second plaintiff reported rape by a 21-year-old and a 29-year-old at the age of 14, while the third plaintiff recounted being violated by an 18-year-old in her own home after a party when she was 16.

The Court thus condemned France for violating several articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, where torture and inhuman or degrading treatment are expressly prohibited, as well as those enshrining the right of women to respect for their private lives.

Today’s ruling is bound to keep alive—and probably to refresh—the national debate on whether to include in the definition of rape provided by criminal law also the notion of consent, or to be more precise, the absence thereof. Since last year, when the landmark trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men accused of having repeatedly raped Gisèle, Pelicot’s wife whom he drugged for that purpose, the discussion has focused mainly on the (non)consensual dimension of the sexual act.

French regulations have increased penalties for sexual violence and “misconduct”, but there is still a long way to go, according to French human rights activists. To date, national legislation deems the definition of rape satisfied when “an act of sexual penetration or an oral-genital act is committed on a person, by violence, coercion, threat, or surprise.”

On the merits, the regulatory systems of the Twenty-seven differ greatly. What is certain is that in the EU, the numbers on gender-based violence are still dangerously high: one in three women will experience at least one sexual assault in their lifetime in the home, workplace, or public place. For half the population of the Union, which professes to be a global bastion of human rights, no place is safe, despite steps taken by EU lawmakers—and some member states—in the right direction.